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Correlations between concentrations of newly formed particles and sulfuric acid vapor were analyzed for twenty one nucleation events measured in diverse continental and marine atmospheric environments. A simple power law model for formation rates of 1 nm particles, J 1 = K · H 2 SO 4 P , where P and K are least squares parameters, was tested for each environment. We found that, to within experimental uncertainty, P = 2. Constraining P to 2, the prefactor K kinetic ranges from 10 −14 to 10 −11 cm 3 s −1 . According to the nucleation theorem, an exponent value of 2 indicates that the critical cluster contains two sulfuric acid molecules. Existing nucleation rate expressions based on classical nucleation theory predict significantly larger values of P . The prefactor values vary with environment and are 1 to 4 orders of magnitude below the hard‐sphere collision limit. These results provide a simple parameterization for atmospheric new particle formation that could be used in global climate models.
Kuang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.